Posts

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Ham radioing

A new hobby is probably the last thing i need to get into right now, with all the PhD work I’ve been procrastinating on.

That’s never stopped me before though.

Decided to make a trip out to the Atlanta Hamfest where I’ll meet up with a road-tripping ham radio friend and most likely take the ham licensing tests.

I’ve had a passing interest in amateur radio for a while now and ever since I pushed it as a Barcamp topic a few years ago, I’ve had a few people “encouraging” me to get my license.

So now I’m finally going to do it and enter the world of amateur radio. This should be interesting and fun.

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Collaboration phishing

I’ve received a couple of emails claiming to be from people who are interested in working with me on a project based on a blog post.

The first one I received a couple of days ago almost seemed genuine enough to make me think about it a little bit longer than usual before deciding it was just another form of phishing. The second one I received today pretty much confirmed that.

If the random URLs the spammers picked for their email were even remotely related to the claimed project, I almost might have been fooled. Big fat fail, spammers.

Both emails had the same form

I am curious if you are the person responsible for adding content to the following page: <Insert random URL>

If not, feel free to forward me on to the correct person! I came across your page during my research for a project for which I am contributor. It is a resource primarily aimed at health care professionals in a <Insert random health care profession> capacity. Our mission is to be an objective, informative source of information for those in the specialized fast-paced field of <Insert random health care profession>.

I would love to send over more details about this project and partner with you, let me know!

Thanks for your time. I look forward to working with you!

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Testing endurance limits

During my run today the thought popped into my head to see how far I could go at my 6:00/km comfort pace.

Kilometer 12 is where I hit the wall.

I was still feeling pretty good at kilometer 10, and thinking I could maybe make it to 15km.

Legs were starting to get a little tired at kilometer 11, but still felt like 15km was within reach.

Halfway into kilometer 12, my legs turned into lead weights.

Fortunately it was on the stretch heading back towards the house, so I was able to finish the 12km run without having to walk too far to get back home.

Pretty good long run today. A little damp from some light sprinkles, but fortunately the rain held off until after I got back home.

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Adding a little speed work

I feel like I have a pretty good endurance base now, so it’s time to mix up the running a bit with some speed work. My goal isn’t necessarily to race faster, but just to add some variety to my running workouts.

There’s no track near me and since I hate intervals anyway, my plan is to throw in one, maybe two days of fartleks and tempo runs a week.

Should help with dropping a little more weight too (I probably need to start going back to the gym as well).

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5.6%

Had my annual check up at the doctor today. A bit of poking and prodding and another clean bill of health (aside from the diabetes thing).

HbA1c was down to 5.6% today which is down in the normal range. Management success!

Should get results from the bloodwork in a few days. Will be interesting to see how that comes out.

Update:
Total cholesterol – 171. Lower than last year when it was 193.

HDL – 51. Still lower than what the little yellow card says it should be (>60), but higher than last year’s 42.

LDL – 108. Up a little bit from 100 last year. Need to work on bringing it down.

Rest of the blood work came out normal.